Page 31 of Made in Love and Blood

Why had Frankie stopped screaming?

And why the hell did Marco Russo just drive them off the fucking road?

5. — unsafe people...

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Staten Island, New York

Frankie, SIU Hospital

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“Your father is fine, so tone down the attitude and get some rest,” Sissy told her for the fifth time in the last hour.

“I want to see him.”

“It’s after nine. The ICU is not letting you walk these halls. Some people are actually sick here, Frankie. Sick and dying.”

She tried hard not to glare and failed. “I didn’t ask to be put in the ICU, okay.”

“Your father has connections. As for this hospital? There are people here who know those connections very well and must respond as expected, or they pay a price.”

That stopped further argument from Frankie, if only because it made her think.

Sissy took the quiet opportunity between them to tut around her ward with gentle hands that roved the surface scrapes on the underside of Frankie’s jaw and the stiches along the upper line of her eyebrow.

“Is that why when I told the EMT my name, he asked someone to make a call?”

She didn’t get an answer.

The moments after the crash were still somewhat fuzzy. She thought Larkin had been there, but the adrenaline kick from it all caught up to her. Did he show up right after it happened? Someone always tailed them.

“Belle fille. Je t’aime. Cela vous tuerait de le perdre. But that would undo us all, too.” The soft whispers of French turned to English at the same time Sissy knelt beside the hospital bed to make Frankie meet her eyes. A sternness stared back, but the fact she bent down put the two on level ground. She softened a bit, trying to let the attitude bleed away. “He’s got a minor concussion and a few scrapes and bruises. The worst was the glass they pulled out of his hand. He’s walked, talked, and they are going to let him eat in the morning. You can have breakfast with him before they discharge you.”

It wasn’t good enough. One look at Sissy told her it would have to be.

“Fine. Will you brush Sassy tonight for me?”

Sissy nodded. “If she’ll let me, you know how she gets.”

“She’s just old.”

“She follows me around all day to bark, for no reason. She doesn’t do that to other people. Only me. On my busiest days. That isn’t old behavior, it’s pettiness. Because do you know when she does it the most?”

Frankie pressed her lips together, suppressing the truth. “No.”

“You do. She does it every time the vet puts her back on a diet and I buy the food she doesn’t like. You stop giving her extra treats, the food minder changes the food, and who do you think she blames?”

“Dogs don’t understand pettiness. Only love.”

Cats, on the other hand...

Sissy laughed, her usual signal of giving up. “Fine, Taylor Swift, whatever you say. Someday you’ll write and sing odes to your animals the way she does for boys.”

“Ew, no thank you.”

She knew fame through the lens of her stepmother, and it would never be her world.